Author: Aldous Huxley
Category: Literature
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‘Come, come,’ said Mr. Cardan, ‘you forget that they called Bacchus Fufluns. Give them at least the credit that is due to them.’
‘But the Romans too had a fine language,’ Chelifer objected. ‘And yet they laid down immense enlargements of the sporting page of the Daily Sketch in marble tesserae on a foundation of cement.’
They climbed again towards the light. The steps were so high and her legs so short that Miss Elver had to be helped up. The tomb resounded with her laughter and shrill whooping. They emerged at last out of the ground.
On the top of a high barrow some two or three hundred yards away stood the figure of a man, distinct against the sky. He was shading his eyes with his hand and seemed to be looking for something. Irene suddenly became very red.
‘Why, I believe it’s Hovenden,’ she said in a voice that was as casual as she could make it.
Almost simultaneously the man turned his face in their direction. The shading hand went up in a gesture of greeting. A glad ‘Hullo!’ sounded across the tombs; the man skipped down from his barrow and came running across the down towards them. And Hovenden it was; Irene had seen aright.
‘Been looking for you all over ve place,’ he explained breathlessly as he came up. With the greatest heartiness he shook the hands of all present except — diplomatically — Irene’s. ‘Vey told me in ve town vat a party of foreigners was out here looking at ve cemetery or somefing. So I buzzed after you till I saw old Ernest wiv ve car at ve side of ve road. Been underground, have you?’ He looked into the dark entrance of the tomb. ‘No wonder I couldn’t . . .’
Mrs. Aldwinkle cut him short. ‘But why aren’t you in Rome with Mr. Falx?’ she asked.
Lord Hovenden’s boyish, freckled face became all at once exceedingly red. ‘Ve fact is,’ he said, looking at the ground, ‘vat I didn’t feel very well. Ve doctor said I ought to get away from Rome at once. Country air, you know. So I just left a note for Mr. Falx and . . . and here I am.’ He looked up again, smiling.
CHAPTER VI
‘BUT AT MONTEFIASCONE,’ said Mr. Cardan, concluding the history of the German bishop who gave the famous wine of Montefiascone its curious name, ‘at Montefiascone Bishop Defuk’s servant found good wine at every shop and tavern; so that when his master arrived he found the prearranged symbol chalked up on a hundred doors. Est, Est, Est — the town was full of them. And the Bishop was so much enraptured with the drink that he decided to settle in Montefiascone for life. For life — but he drank so much that in a very short time it turned out that he had settled here for death. They buried him in the lower church, down there. On his tombstone his servant engraved the Bishop’s portrait with this brief epitaph: “Est Est Jo Defuk. Propter nimium hic est. Dominus meus mortuus est.” Since when the wine has always been called Est Est Est. We’ll have a flask of it dry for serious drinking. And for the frivolous and the feminine, and to sip with the dessert, we’ll have a bottle of the sweet moscato. And now let’s see what there is to eat.’ He picked up the menu and holding it out at arm’s length — for he had the long sight of old age — read out slowly, with comments, the various items. It was always Mr. Cardan who ordered the dinner (although it was generally Lord Hovenden or Mrs. Aldwinkle who paid), always Mr. Cardan; for it was tacitly admitted by every one that Mr. Cardan was the expert on food and wine, the professional eater, the learned and scholarly drinker.
Seeing Mr. Cardan busy with the bill of fare, the landlord approached, rubbing his hands and cordially smiling — as well he might on a Rolls-Royce-full of foreigners — to take orders and give advice.
‘The fish,’ he confided to Mr. Cardan, ‘the fish is something special.’ He put his fingers to his lips and kissed them. ‘It comes from Bolsena, from the lake, down there.’ He pointed out of the window at the black night. Somewhere, far down through the darkness, lay the Lake of Bolsena.
Mr. Cardan held up his hand. ‘No, no,’ he objected with decision and shook his head. ‘Don’t talk to me of fish. Never safe in these little places,’ he explained to his companions. ‘Particularly in such hot weather. And then, imagine eating fish from Bolsena — a place where they have miracles, where holy wafers bleed for the edification of the pious and as a proof of the fact of transubstantiation. No, no,’ Mr. Cardan repeated, ‘fishes from Bolsena are altogether too fishy. Let’s stick to fried eggs, with fillet of veal to follow. Or a little roast capon . . .’
‘I want fish,’ said Miss Elver. The passionate earnestness of her tone contrasted strikingly with the airiness of Mr. Cardan’s banter.
‘I really wouldn’t, you know,’ said Mr. Cardan.
‘But I like fish.’
‘But it may be unwholesome. You never can tell.’
‘But I want it,’ Miss Elver insisted. ‘I love fish.’ Her large lower lip began to tremble, her eyes filled with tears. ‘I want it.’
‘Well, then, of course you shall have it,’ said Mr. Cardan, making haste to console her. ‘Of course, if you really like it. I was only afraid that it mightn’t perhaps be good. But it probably will be.’
Miss Elver took comfort, blew her long nose and smiled. ‘Thank you, Tommy,’ she said, and blushed as she pronounced the name.
After dinner they went out into the piazza for coffee and liqueurs. The square was crowded and bright with lights. In the middle the band of the local Philharmonic Society was giving its Sunday evening concert. Planted on the rising ground above the piazza Sammicheli’s great church solemnly impended. The lights struck up, illuminating its pilastered walls. The cupola stood out blackly against the sky.
‘The choice,’ said Mr. Cardan, looking round the piazza, ‘seems to lie between the Café Moderno and the Bar Ideale. Personally, I should be all for the ideal rather than the real if it wasn’t for the disagreeable fact that in a bar one has to stand. Whereas in a café, however crassly materialistic, one can sit down. I’m afraid the Moderno forces itself upon us.’
He led the way in the direction of the café.
‘Talking of Bars,’ said Chelifer, as they sat down at a little table in front of the café, ‘has it ever occurred to you to enumerate the English words that have come to have an international currency? It’s a somewhat curious selection, and one which seems to me to throw a certain light on the nature and significance of our Anglo-Saxon civilization. The three words from Shakespeare’s language that have a completely universal currency are Bar, Sport and W.C. They’re all just as good Finnish now as they are good English. Each of these words possesses what I may call a family. Round the idea “Bar” group themselves various other international words, such as Bitter, Cocktail, Whiskey and the like. “Sport” boasts a large family — Match, for example, Touring Club, the verb to Box, Cycle-Car, Performance (in the sporting sense) and various others. The idea of hydraulic sanitation has only one child that I can think of, namely Tub. Tub — it has a strangely old-world sound in English nowadays; but in Yugo-Slavia, on the other hand, it is exceedingly up-to-date. Which leads us on to that very odd class of international English words that have never been good English at all. A Smoking for example, a Dancing, a Five-o’clock — these have never existed except on the continent of Europe. As for High-Life, so popular a word in Athens, where it is spelt iota, gamma, lambda, iota, phi — that dates from a remote, mid-Victorian epoch in the history of our national culture.’
‘And Spleen,’ said Mr. Cardan, ‘you forget Spleen. That comes from much further back. A fine aristocratic word, that; we were fools to allow it to become extinct. One has to go to France to hear it uttered now.’
‘The word may be dead,’ said Chelifer, I but the emotion, I fancy, has never flourished more luxuriantly than now. The more material progress, the more wealth and leisure, the more standardized amusements — the more boredom. It’s inevitable, it’s the law of Nature. The people who have always suffered from spleen and who are still the principal victims, are the prosperous, leisured and educated. At present they form a relatively small minority; but in the Utopian
state where everybody is well off, educated and leisured, everybody will be bored; unless for some obscure reason the same causes fail to produce the same effects. Only two or three hundred people out of every million could survive a lifetime in a really efficient Utopian state. The rest would simply die of spleen. In this way, it may be, natural selection will work towards the evolution of the super-man. Only the intelligent will be able to bear the almost intolerable burden of leisure and prosperity. The rest will simply wither away, or cut their throats — or, perhaps more probably, return in desperation to the delights of barbarism and cut one another’s throats, not to mention the throats of the intelligent.’
‘That certainly sounds the most likely and natural ending,’ said Mr. Cardan. ‘If of two possible alternatives one is in harmony with our highest aspirations and the other is, humanly speaking, absolutely pointless and completely wasteful, then, you may be sure, Nature will choose the second.’
At half-past ten Miss Elver complained that she did not feel very well. Mr. Cardan sighed and shook his head. ‘These miraculous fishes,’ he said. They went back to the hotel.
‘Luckily,’ said Mrs. Aldwinkle that evening while Irene was brushing her hair, ‘luckily I never had any babies. They spoil the figure so frightfully.’
‘Still,’ Irene ventured to object, ‘still . . . they must be rather fun, all the same.’
Mrs. Aldwinkle pretexted a headache and sent her to bed almost at once. At half-past two in the morning Irene was startled out of her sleep by a most melancholy groaning and crying from the room next to hers. ‘Oo, Oo! Ow!’ It was Grace Elver’s voice. Irene jumped out of bed and ran to see what was the matter. She found Miss Elver lying in a tumbled bed, writhing with pain.
‘What is it?’ she asked.
Miss Elver made no articulate answer. ‘Oo, Oo,’ she kept repeating, turning her head from side to side as though in the hope of escaping from the obsessing pain.
Irene ran to her aunt’s bedroom, knocked at the door and, getting no answer, walked in. ‘Aunt Lilian,’ she called in the darkness, and louder, ‘Aunt Lilian!’ There was still no sound. Irene felt for the switch and turned on the light. Mrs. Aldwinkle’s bed was empty. Irene stood there for a moment looking dubiously at the bed, wondering, speculating. From down the corridor came the repeated ‘Oo, Oo!’ of Grace Elver’s inarticulate pain. Roused by the sound from her momentary inaction, Irene turned, stepped across the passage and began knocking at Mr. Cardan’s door.
CHAPTER VII
SELECTIONS FROM FRANCIS Chelifer
In the sporting calendar the most interesting events are booked for the autumnal months. There is no hunting in the spring. And even in Italy there is a brief close season for song-birds that lasts from the coming of the nightingales to the departure of the last swallow. The fun, the real fun, starts only in the autumn. Grouse-shooting, partridge-shooting — these are the gay preliminaries. But the great day is the First of October, when the massacre of the gaudy pheasant begins. Crack! crack! — the double barrels make music in the fading woods. And a little later the harmonious dogs join in and the hoof, as the Latin poet so aptly puts it, the hoof shakes the putrid field with quadrupedantical sound. Winter is made gay with the noise of hunting.
It is the same in the greater year of certain feminine lives. . . . Pop! pop! — on the First of October they go out to shoot the pheasant. A few weeks later, tally-ho, they hunt the fox. And on Guy Fawkes’s day the man-eating season begins. My hostess, when she picked me up on the beach of Marina di Vezza, had reached a point in her year somewhere between pheasant-shooting and man-eating. They say that foxes enjoy being hunted; but I venture to doubt the truth of this comforting hypothesis. Experientia does it, as Mrs. Micawber’s papa (ha ha! from Mr. Toft) . . . Etcetera.
If loving without being loved in return may be ranked as one of the most painful of experiences, being loved without loving is certainly one of the most boring. Perhaps no experience is better calculated to make one realize the senselessness of the passion. The spectacle of some one making a fool of himself arouses only laughter. When one is playing the fool oneself, one weeps. But when one is neither the active imbecile nor the disinterested spectator, but the unwilling cause of somebody else’s folly — then it is that one comes to feel that weariness and that disgust which are the proper, the human reaction to any display of the deep animal stupidity that is the root of all evil.
Twice in my life have I experienced these salutary horrors of boredom — once by my own fault, because I asked to be loved without loving; and once because I had the misfortune to be picked up on the beach, limp as sea-weed, between the First of October and Guy Fawkes’s day. The experiences were disagreeable while they lasted; but on the other hand, they were highly didactic. The first of them rounded off, so to speak, the lesson I had learned from Barbara. The second episode was staged by Providence, some few years later, to remind me of the first and to print what the Americans would call its ‘message’ still more indelibly upon my mind. Providence has been remarkably persistent in its efforts to sober me. To what end I cannot imagine.
Poor Miss Masson! She was a very good secretary. By the end of 1917 she knew all that it was possible to know about rubber tubing and castor oil. It was unfortunate for every one concerned that Providence should have destined her to instruct me yet more deeply in the fearful mysteries of love. True, I brought it on myself. Providence, on that occasion, elected to act indirectly and threw the blame on me. I accept it all — all the more willingly since my act shows in the most illuminating manner what are the consequences, the frightful consequences, of stupidity. There is a certain satisfaction to be derived from having personally proved the truth of one’s own wisdom by acting in defiance of its precepts.
Yes, I brought it on myself. For it was I who made the first advances. It was I who, out of pure wantonness, provoked the sleeping, or at least well-disciplined tiger that lay hidden in Dorothy Masson’s heart — put my walking-stick between the bars and, against all the rules, poked it rudely in the ribs. I got what I asked for.
I was like that wanton Blackamoor in one of old Busch’s misanthropically comic picture-books.
Ein Mohr aus Bosheit und Pläsier
Schiesst auf das Elefantentier.
With his little arrow he punctures the placid pachyderm; and the pachyderm takes his revenge, elaborately, through fourteen subsequent woodcuts.
My only excuse — the recentness of that ludicrous catastrophe with which the tragedy of Barbara had concluded — was an excuse that might equally have served as an additional reason against doing what I did; I ought, after having once been bitten, to have shown myself twice shy. But in the state of misery in which I found myself I hoped that a second bite might distract my attention from the anguish of the first. And even this is not precisely accurate; for I never anticipated that the second would really be a bite at all. I looked forward merely to a kind of playful diversion, not to anything painful. True, when I found how serious the affair threatened to become for Dorothy Masson, I might have guessed that it would soon be serious also for myself, and have drawn back. But, inspired by that high-spirited irresponsibility which I have come since then so highly to admire in the natural, brutish human specimen, I refused to consider possible consequences and went on in the course I had begun. I was not in the least in love with the woman; nor did her person inspire me with any specific desire. My motive forces were misery, mingled with a kind of exasperation, and the vague itch of recurrent appetite. More than half of the world’s ‘affairs’ have no more definite reasons for occurring. Ennui and itch are their first causes. Subsequently imagination may come into play and love will be born. Or experience may beget specific desires and in so doing may render one party necessary to the happiness of the other, or each to each. Or perhaps there will be no development at all and the affair will end placidly as it began, in itch and ennui.
But there are cases, of which mine was one, where one party may be inspired by the me
re indefinite wantonness I have been describing, while the other is already imagination-ridden and in love. Poor Dorothy! There came into her eyes when I kissed her a look such as I had never seen in any other human eyes before or since. It was the look one sees in the eyes of a dog when its master is angry and raises his whip — a look of absolute self-abasement mingled with terror. There was something positively appalling in seeing those eyes staring at one out of a woman’s face. To see a human being reduced in one’s arms to the condition of a frightened and adoring dog is a shocking thing. And the more so in this case since it was completely indifferent to me whether she was in my arms or not. But when she raised her face and looked at me for a moment with those abject and terrified eyes of hers, it was not merely indifferent to me; it was even positively distasteful. The sight of those large-pupilled eyes, in which there was no glimmer of a human rational soul, but only an animal’s terror and abasement, made me feel at once guilty and, complementarily, angry, resentful and hostile.
‘Why do you look at me like that?’ I asked her once. ‘As though you were frightened of me.’
She did not answer; but only hid her face against my shoulder, and pressed me more closely in her arms. Her body shook with involuntary startings and tremblings. Casually, from force of habit, I caressed her. The trembling became more violent. ‘Don’t,’ she implored me in a faint hoarse whisper, ‘don’t.’ But she pressed me still closer.
She was frightened, it seemed, not of me but of herself, of that which lay sleeping in the depths of her being and whose awakening threatened to overwhelm, to blot for a moment out of existence that well-ordered, reasonable soul which was the ruler at ordinary times of her life. She was afraid of the power within her that could make her become something other than her familiar self. She was fearful of losing her self-mastery. And at the same time there was nothing else that she desired. The sleeping power within her had begun to stir and there was no resisting it. Vainly, hopelessly, she continued to attempt the impossible. She went on trying to resist, and her resistance quickened her desire to yield. She was afraid and yet invited my awakening kisses. And while she whispered to me imploringly, like one who begs for mercy, she pressed me in her arms. I, meanwhile, had begun to realize all the potentialities for boredom implicit in the situation. And how boring it did in fact turn out to be! To be pursued by restless warmth when all that one desires is cool peace; to be perpetually and quite justly accused of remissness in love and to have to deny the accusation, feebly, for the sake of politeness; to be compelled to pass hours in tedious company — what an affliction, what a martyrdom it is! I came to feel extremely sorry for those pretty women who are perpetually being courted by a swarm of men. But the pretty women, I reflected, had this advantage over me: that they were by nature a good deal more interested in love than I. Love is their natural business, the reason of their existence; however distasteful their suitors may personally be to them, they cannot find them as completely boring and insufferable as would, placed in similar circumstances, a person to whom love as such is fundamentally rather uninteresting. The most tedious lover atones a little, in the eyes of the courted lady, for his personal insupportableness by the generic fact of being a lover. Lacking a native enthusiasm for love, I found it more difficult to support the martyrdom of being loved by Miss Masson.